[skybrian]

We could compare with git. Sure, you could publish a git repo anywhere, but most people will choose Github, Gitlab, or another large git hosting service. The reliability of these services matters and we’re fortunate that they’ve been quite good so far. People don’t usually use custom domain names when publishing git repos, though I suppose you could?

With Mastodon you can download your data any time, but you can’t actually upload it anywhere else. There is forwarding, but only for follower subscriptions, with the cooperation of both servers. It’s quite limited. There are brownouts from servers getting overloaded and also due to fairly frequent policy disputes. It does let you do more things without making them public, though, and that’s important to many people.

The blogging model where you have actually independent websites, links, and RSS feeds seems better from a decentralization standpoint, but it’s not popular due to the difficulty of getting people to subscribe to your blog.

That’s why we comment here, right? You could post a comment to your blog, but who would read it? Replies are important.